[compound-engineering] Bug: ce:review reviewer subagents may recurse into ce:review

[ChushulSuri]

Bug Description

Component: Skill not working - ce:review
Summary: ce:review reviewer subagents appear able to recurse back into ce:review when the workflow is invoked as a skill, causing nested review trees instead of a single review pass.

Environment

• Plugin Version: latest CE upstream content synced into OpenCode Stack, including the document-review recursion fix from compound-engineering-v2.63.0
• Agent Platform: OpenCode / OpenCode Stack
• Agent Version: 1.3.17
• OS: Darwin 25.3.0 x86_64

What Happened

When ce:review was invoked as a skill, we observed one instance where the review appeared to recurse into additional nested review layers instead of staying inside the originally spawned reviewer personas.

This did not present as a hard error message. The failure mode looked behavioral:

• ce:review spawned its reviewer personas
• one of those delegated reviewers appeared to re-enter the parent code-review workflow
• the result looked like nested review trees rather than a single orchestrator pass with leaf reviewers

Important nuance:

• I am not reporting ordinary parallel reviewer fan-out as the bug
• the suspected bug is reviewer subagents re-entering ce:review itself

We have not observed this when using the corresponding command path in the same way, only when ce:review was used as a skill.

Expected Behavior

ce:review should:

1. determine review scope
2. spawn its selected reviewer personas once
3. collect and synthesize their findings
4. return the review result

Reviewer subagents spawned by ce:review should remain leaf reviewers and should not invoke ce:review or other CE review/planning workflows unless explicitly instructed.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Invoke ce:review as a skill inside a larger workflow or skill-driven context.
2. Let ce:review reach its reviewer dispatch stage.
3. Observe reviewer personas being spawned.
4. In at least one observed case, one of those reviewer personas appears to re-enter ce:review instead of staying inside its delegated reviewer role.
5. Observe nested review behavior / repeated review fan-out.

Error Messages

No single hard error message was captured.

The issue presented as behavioral recursion:

• nested review layers
• apparent re-entry from a delegated reviewer back into ce:review
• more review orchestration than expected for a single review run

Additional Context

Why this looks plausible from the current prompts:

• document-review was recently fixed by adding a shared leaf-reviewer guard in its subagent template:
  • “You are a leaf reviewer inside an already-running compound-engineering review workflow. Do not invoke compound-engineering skills or agents unless this template explicitly instructs you to.”
• ce:review appears not to have the equivalent protection in its own shared reviewer subagent template
• the individual reviewer agents still only appear guarded against invoking themselves, not against invoking the parent ce:review workflow again
• in hosts with strong skill-routing behavior, that seems like a plausible re-entry path

So this may be the same bug family as the previous document-review recursion issue, but in the code-review workflow instead of the document-review workflow.

Suggested fix:
Add the same class of parent-workflow guard to the shared ce:review reviewer subagent template, for example:

• “You are a leaf reviewer inside an already-running compound-engineering review workflow.”
• “Do not invoke compound-engineering skills or agents unless this template explicitly instructs you to.”
• “Perform your analysis directly and return findings in the required output format only.”

That would make ce:review consistent with the fix already applied to document-review.

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Reported via /report-bug-ce style workflow

[tmchow]

Fixed in 2.63.1